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Woman gets 6-12 for giving fatal heroin dose to beloved Capt. Redbeard

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From left, defendant Jennifer Harriman, defense attorney Heather Ward and prosecutor Tim Sullivan at May hearing; inset, Jason Danner. (The Lebanon Voice photo; inset, Courtesy photo),

DOVER - A Rochester woman was sentenced to six to 12 years in a state prison after she pleaded guilty today in Strafford County Superior Court to the charge of giving heroin to a person who overdosed and died in 2014.

Jennifer Harriman, 34, of 141 Flagg Road, was indicted in March 2015 on the charge of dispensing controlled drug - death resulting, which could have resulted in a life sentence if convicted.

Jason Danner, known fondly by friends and family as "Captain Redbeard" for his flowing, full beard, overdosed from the heroin on June 23, 2014, a Monday.

Doctors at Frisbie Memorial Hospital induced a coma in an effort to save him, but his mom, Debbi Danner, of Rochester, was told it was hopeless and they took him off life support. His heart didn't stop beating, however, till the following Monday, making for a week of misery and despair for family and friends who held vigils in hopes he would somehow miraculously recover.

In this 2014 photo, Pictures of her son and a book she gave him as a child lie on Debbi Danner's kitchen table as she recounts the life of her eldest son, Jason, who died of a heroin overdose in June 2014. (Lebanon Voice file photo)

Jason Danner didn't start using drugs until after high school. He started off with prescription pain medications like Oxycodone, his mom sad during an extended interview with The Lebanon Voice shortly after his death.

"He told me he had friends who could buy it from cancer patients, there was endless amounts," Debbi Danner said. "Then they would crush and snort it."

But then the supplies dried up and Oxycodone got really expensive. Meanwhile, heroin was cheap.

Then Jason got fired from his first job where he had become a manager. His mom said it wasn't his fault and he took it hard.

She thinks that's when he used the first time. And he got hooked.

At first he didn't have to shoot up every day. But then after a while, he did.

In all Debbi Danner helped her son through three detoxes.

"I would meet his counselors, I'd go to the appointments," she said. "It was a long road."

Throughout the decade of Jason's heroin addiction, Debbi Danner said she became increasingly frustrated with a system that makes social services available for the poor, like TANF, food stamps and housing, but had virtually nothing to help her son and/or the people trying to help him through his addiction.

Jennifer Harriman

"One thing that was the hardest, Frank (Jason's dad and her former husband) and I neither had the means (to pay for treatment)," she said. "We were financially strapped, yet there were no resources to help my son.

"Unless you have money, with heroin addiction, there is nothing out there to help you," she said, a trace of bitterness in her voice. "I went online, I called everybody in this whole freaking world I could think of for somebody who would take him in, do inpatient rehab, anything to help me out.

"I wasn't qualified to treat him. All I could do was my best. All we could do was be there; sometimes that's not enough."

She said at times she felt so helpless.

"I didn't know any way to keep him from starting. I couldn't find anybody to help me, teach me how to help him. As a teenager I smoked a little dope, but I don't know how to help somebody with this."

Jason Danner had lots of friends, his mom said.

"There were people I didn't even know who came up to me at his funeral to say they worked with him and how nice he was," she said sitting at a kitchen table in her apartment on a quiet side street near the Rochester Commons. "There must have been a hundred people at his funeral."

"He was such a good boy," she said. "He had a heart of gold. He was always there for his younger brother (who suffers from Asperger's syndrome) without hesitation. He'd get him on the bus, off the bus."

Debbi Danner now knows heroin addiction is a deep, dark tunnel from which there may be no escape.

But that doesn't mean a parent doesn't try, she says.

A line in his obituary sums up his family's profound sorrow. It read, "We all tried to help him through his addiction so many times throughout the years and sometimes thought we were winning; but in the end we lost."

Back in her apartment she gives one final note of advice for other parents who may be dealing with a child's addiction to heroin.

"Never give up, and keep your eyes open all the time," she says. "I wish I had spent more time with him."

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